1. Field
Embodiments relate generally to web services and, more specifically, to systems for identifying experts whose reviews are used to rank local search results or reviews of search results.
2. Description of the Related Art
Local search engines are generally used to obtain information about businesses and other points of interest related to some geographic area. For example, a user may submit a query for “Italian restaurants in New York,” and in response, a local search engine typically attempts to identify responsive content, such as websites of Italian restaurants in New York and reviews of such restaurants. Generally, however, local search queries implicate substantially more web resources than a user is interested in viewing (e.g., there may be several hundred websites of, or about, New York Italian restaurants), and identifying the subset of responsive web resources likely to warrant the user's attention can be difficult.
Often, some users are particularly knowledgeable about certain topics relating to local search queries, for instance some users are experts in a particular genre of restaurants, a particular city or neighborhood, a type of retailer, or a combination of these categories (e.g., the New York Italian restaurants responsive to the above-mentioned query). Such experts, however, can be difficult to identify, particularly at web scale, as many users with relatively little expertise will hold forth on various topics; some users will self identify as experts in order to propagate spam for commercial benefit; and the number of local-search topics on which one may be an expert is very large.